Some of the most awkward and alluring performance spaces in Europe, including the Roundhouse in north London and other circular buildings, are clubbing together to spend £1m commissioning a new 360-degree theatre piece from the Canadian director Robert Lepage.

The show, Cartes, opens in Madrid in May, and will come to the Roundhouse early next year, but none of the venues quite know what they're getting yet. "That's factored in, we're all going to the first night in Madrid and then we'll see – but we know it's going to be wonderful," said Marcus Davey, chief executive of the Roundhouse.

They do know that the play opens in Las Vegas in 2003, the first year of the Iraq war, and that Lepage, legendary as a theatre, opera, circus and dance director, writer and performer, has already been working on it for the best part of a year in Quebec, with a team from Canada, Spain, France, Germany and the UK. The set is contained within a specially built circular stage, which will tour to all the venues.

The play is only the first of four, each based on a suit of cards, eventually intended to be seen together in one marathon performance – lasting 12 hours. Lepage has worked before at the Roundhouse, a venue noted for alternative theatre which reopened five years ago, and when he was working in another circular building in Challons in France, suggested that they had much in common.

The result is the new 360-degree Network of round performance spaces including the London Victorian train shed, former gasworks in Denmark and Holland, beautiful old indoor circus buildings in France, a Swedish waterworks, and a brand new circular building in Madrid named in honour of an English 19th-century circus proprietor, and nostalgically provided by the architect with backstage space big enough for elephants.

As well as commissioning work together and hosting touring shows, the teams from the venues will meet regularly to discuss the best ways of working with theatre genuinely in the round. "We want to show off and celebrate these amazing buildings," Davey said. "There's something awe inspiring about them, you always get the feeling a few Christians are about to be thrown to the lions." The Roundhouse, as well as featuring a long season by the Royal Shakespeare Company from May to July, part of the world Shakespeare festival planned for the London Olympics year, and an international circus season from March, is launching an international youth arts forum, to create the first of biennial youth arts festivals in 2014.

It has also secured sponsorship to launch a street circus company for young performers – having trained 17,000 teenagers in circus and creative skills in the last five years. If and when the four parts of Lepage's Cartes are eventually performed together, it would mark a return to the glory days of the Roundhouse when it became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for marathon shows, including a Ken Campbell roadshow which – in the hazy memory of audience and cast – lasted for more than 24 hours.

Lepage himself has a reputation for the epic. In 1994 in Edinburgh he was persuaded against his better judgment to put an incomplete piece of work into a main theatre instead of a workshop production – the first night overran by more than two hours.